This blog site initially focused on renewable energy and the environment. But that was SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Planet Earth. My next book, SS for Humanity, opened the subject area to everything else, including SETI, the afterlife, travel and cuisine. However, I still provide, now and then, SIMPLE SOLUTIONS.

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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY: Part 2

A SIMPLE SOLUTION FOR PEAK OIL AND GLOBAL WARMING

I have now penned two SIMPLE SOLUTION books, one on Planet Earth and the second on Humanity. Let me draw from the first one and provide just one simple solution to solve our energy/environment problem. But first, some background.

The current issue of Time (5July10) reports on Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Jeffrey Immelt (GE), representing a group of corporate titans, beseeching Congress just last week to TRIPLE U.S. spending on energy research. They underscored that energy gets less than $5 billion/year, but $80 billion goes for military R&D. Said Immelt:

"This is about innovation. This is about competition. This is about energy security."

Never have industrial leaders collectively made this kind of plea. If we can spend $3,000 billion (also known as $3 trillion) on just the Iraq War, supposedly to neutralize Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, but, more to protect oil and bring peace to the Middle East, hindsight argues that if this sum had been applied to spur our private sector to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, we might not today be at the precipice awaiting the dual hammer of Peak Oil and Global Warming.

My second Huffington Post article of two years ago blamed the lack of will on part of the people for our current predicament. This aloof attitude remains, for our masses are now accustomed to $3/gallon gasoline (remember, Europe is double to triple this price), plus, they can't appreciate hardly detectable global temperature increase and sea level rise. It hurts that the disinformation campaign from oil and coal interests are easier to believe than the rantings of a bunch of scientists accused of a possible hoax. But what do you expect from a nation attracted to vampires and the afterlife.

Swine flu and oil spills bring out the personal concern and general ire on the part of our populace, but energy and carbon dioxide policies are somewhere between ho hum and who cares. The fact that many Democrats in the Senate from fossil fuel states are preventing the Obama Administration from pushing along the Waxman-Markey Clean Energy Bill, which was approved by the House more than a year ago, is just another symptom of how much our decision-makers care about any national energy policy, something we have never had.

As I have underscored in my HuffPos, I actually don't blame the Republicans, George W. Bush, oil companies or OPEC. They were maximizing their interests, and in a free enterprise system, that's fine. Well, I do have a gripe about what President Ronald Reagan did when he came into office in 1981, for he decimated the solar budget. However, the real reason why our sustainable resources were never commercialized was the price of oil, an essentially unpredictable commodity. Very few can actually remember that petroleum in terms of 1998 dollars was the cheapest, EVER, that year. Yes, less expensive than just before the First Energy Crisis in 1973.

Just trace the red line until you hit the bottom, and see that you're in 1998.

What responsible financial institution would take the risk of loaning a hundred million dollars for a solar energy project during those days? While the Chicago Mercantile Exchange today predicts a light crude oil future price of $91.65/barrel in December of 2018, would you stake the future of our country on that investment conundrum? Remember, it was only two years ago this month that oil peaked at $147/barrel. But who knows where the current $75-$80/barrel range will go. $150/barrel if Israel bombs Iran? $35/barrel if there is a more serious double dip grand recession? This fickleness will continue to bedevil renewable energy investments.

We thus need to take extraordinary action, and Gates/Immel's proclamation was an excellent start. Here they are, actually asking government to spend more money on something not directly related to their profit margin (well, GE does sell wind turbines). The marketplace cannot determine the fate of our world, for it takes a full generation (25 years), and longer, to shift energy sources. WE NEED TO START TODAY. So, here is my simple solution:

1. Immediately enact a 5 cents/pound carbon dioxide credit. Okay, this is the same as a tax, but read my HuffPo on this subject. This credit will only increase gasoline by a buck a gallon and double the price of coal electricity. Congress needs to pass this measure, which President Obama should sign, and he further needs to have the G8 nations, China and India comply. Ah, but you say, easy to suggest, but impossible to do. Sure. Simple solutions can be difficult to accomplish. So what next?

2. Get Mother Nature to raise the temperature of the atmosphere so high this summer that tens, if not hundreds, of millions perish. On my contention that we have a fatal flaw in our society--that we cannot make important decisions until it is too late--we then need a cataclysmic event, the more horrible the more effective. Yes, this is terrible, but, save for those who actually die, this would be like taking some bitter medicine to cure your ailment. Then you say, but we have no influence over Mother Nature.

3. Not true! This is all a matter of time. A kind of doomsday will occur if we largely continue on our current consumption pathway, for more species will become extinct, weather will go haywire, and humanity will interminably suffer before action is finally taken. Clearly, our decision-makers will not have the courage to just do it, and the American people just do not riot in the streets for this sort of cause. I was kind of hoping that this world wide web would more directly replace marching protests, but, I haven't yet figured out how to catalyze response.

4. So what then? Await THE VENUS SYNDROME, or at least the upcoming novel of that title. Three degrees F rise? Try an increase of 800 degrees and the end of life on Planet Earth.

-The Dow Jones Industrials further sank 96 to 9774, while, save for Europe, world markets also dropped. The Japan Nikkei is now at 9281. If this decreases below 9000, the timing might be right to consider buying. Gold remained unchanged at $1241/toz and crude oil is at $75/barrel.

-Hurricane Alex a Category 2 at 100 MPH, is now making landfall south of the Rio Grande. Apparently, this is the first June hurricane in the Atlantic (you're either in the Pacific or Atlantic when it comes to American hurricanes) since 1995. Hmm...that does sound ominous.

2 comments:

LKMChong
said...

The truth for people with a comfortable standard of living and short attention span is boring, the untruth gets sussed out, things with truthiness ring hollow, but the STARK RAVING MAD TRUTH gets attention! Keep up the good fight, booyah!

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Most Popular Posts

For the longest time, the day when the most visitors (3,356) clicked on this blog site was 27February2010 on THE CHILE EARTHQUAKE. Why? Probably because this posting was linked to my Huffington Post article of that day reporting on HAWAII TSUNAMI. Natural disasters tend to increase readership. However, on 6March2017THE WONDERS OF ALCOHOL drew 6498. Further, too, on 6June2017, the one-month tally of visitors was 70,219, or 2340/day. For nine years until mid-2017 this daily average consistently remained under 500/day.

Interesting to note that not one of the top 20 postings reports on natural disasters (not sure what those numbers stand for, but they indicate a kind of relativity), the newest of this list goes back five years, and the highest rated this year is just over 300. Clearly, people are reading my older postings, but there is no sense to which subject areas are popular.

VIEWERS

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WE MUST TAKE ACTION ON GLOBAL WARMING NOW!

Last year surpassed 2014 as the warmest year on record since the mid to late 19th century. Global sea level also rose to a new high, 2.75 inches higher than in 1993, when record-keeping began. Tropical cyclones were 25% higher than the average. The Arctic is melting, severely.

WHAT IS THE PRICE OF OIL?

WHAT WILL BE THE FUTURE PRICE OF OIL?

Click on:
FUTURE PRICE OF OIL
to gain a sense of what the financial community thinks will be the future price of crude oil. When I last viewed this Chicago Board of Trade (a NYMEX company) future contracts page on 110March2014, the futures price of oil in December 2022 was $78.59. This makes no sense to me.

CONSUMER PRICE INDEX AND THE INFLATION RATE

The CPI is based on 1984 at 100. Thus, 241 means a 241% inflation since 1984.
There are various ways to look at this, but one is to subtract 100 from 241, getting 141, so the effective inflation today, nearly a third of a century later, is 141% higher. Another comparison is that the CPI in 1916 was 10.9, and is at 240.853 today, a hundred years later. Thus, the average commodity that sold for a buck then, today goes for $22.

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ABOUT ME

I am Director Emeritus of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii and co-founder of the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research.
I have published three SIMPLE SOLUTION books and have written more than 100 articles for the HUFFINGTON POST. I am working with an enlightened team to pioneer the BLUE REVOLUTION (http://bluerevolutionhawaii.blogspot.com/),
beginning with the development of the Pacific International Ocean Station.